Hannah Grieco invited me to visit her essay writing intensive class along with some other nonfiction editors (Vonetta Young, The Offing, Kate Gehan, Pithead Chapel, Matthew E. Henry, Porcupine Literary, Michael Todd Cohen, X-R-A-Y Lit). It was fun to hear what they had to say and the students' questions. I'm all for Zoom these days. Already thinking I won't do a traditional book tour for THE LUNATICS' BALL.

That said, I agreed to be one of the readers for Patricia Q. Bidar's launch of her short story collection PARDON ME FOR MOONWALKING at Books on B, Saturday, February 28, 2:30-4:00 pm. I haven't done a reading in Hayward since my reading on campus when THE MISSING GIRL came out. Looking forward to reading with Patricia, Lynn Mundell, and Dawn Tasaka Steffler. Love their work.

Looking forward to flash publications in LUNCH TICKET (any day now, I think), CLEAVER (not sure when), and now GHOST PARACHUTE (next month). My GHOST PARACHUTE microfiction will be included in the forthcoming anthology, which is fun, because a lot of people I know are included too. I will be for sale at AWP. Sorry I'm not going this year.

Waiting for edits on THE LUNATICS' BALL, due next week. I've started working on permissions and high resolution versions of my illustrations, which I was really worried about, but I managed to locate a TIFF version of the newspaper illustration of the lunatics' ball at Blackwell's Asylum (one that particularly concerned me), and the Metropolitan Museum offers a high resolution version of Toulouse Lautrec right on their site (and it's public domain), so I'm really pleased with my progress.

My first Substack post! I'm planning to post more about THE LUNATICS' BALL, which I won't duplicate here. I started with an illustration of the lunatics' ball at the Blackwell's Island lunatic asylum in 1865. (The subject of one of the early essays in the collection.)

AMAZING NEWS that I’ve known since Thanksgiving, but the acceptance had to clear a university press committee, the holidays intervened, and I wanted to wait until I had a signed contract. It’s official. I signed the contract yesterday.

(In the interim, the manuscript was also named one of twelve finalists for another really great book prize, winner to be announced in the spring. I just withdrew it, but I appreciated the added vote of confidence.)

My book THE LUNATICS’ BALL has been named first runner up for the Gournay Prize and will be published in 2027 by Mad Creek Books (the literary imprint of The Ohio State University Press) in their prestigious 21st Century Essays series. 
 
I am so grateful to the prize judges and series editors Kristen Elias Rowley, David Lazar, and Patrick Madden. I've already had a long Zoom call with Kristen, who will be editing the manuscript, and I love knowing the book will be in her capable hands. (Deadline for edits and permissions, April 1.) I'm grateful to all of the writers who supported the project, and in many cases, critiqued essays as I assembled the book, And to all the editors who accepted individual essays for publication.
 
Still catching my breath.
 
On the 21st Century Essay series:
"This series from Mad Creek Books is a vehicle to discover, publish, and promote some of the most daring, ingenious, and artistic nonfiction. This is the first and only major series that announces its focus on the essay—a genre whose plasticity, timelessness, popularity, and centrality to nonfiction writing make it especially important in the field of nonfiction literature. … The series is a major addition to the possibilities of contemporary literary nonfiction, focusing on that central, frequently chimerical, and invariably supple form: The Essay."
 
This is my dream publisher and series! They’ve published some of my favorite essayists. I already own many of their collections .
 
On my collection. 
My genre-bending essay collection The Lunatics’ Ball explores my two bipolar breakdowns and my bipolar aunt’s suicide within the expanded context of female lunatics in past centuries and the history of the treatment of mental illness in women.

I'll post more about the collection on my Substack, this week and in the coming months.

I love Will Woolfitt's essays, and I'm always gratified to hear that he's teaching mine in his classes at Lee University. He's taught a number of them over the years, and this semester he's teaching "Another Mary Doyle," inspired by Sonja Livingston's "A Thousand Mary Doyles," which he's also teaching. 

Here's the list he sent me, which makes me nostalgic for teaching: 
F 1.23 — Personal Identity & Names Readings: "Being Brians" – Brian Doyle; "Girl" – Jamaica Kincaid; "Where I’m From" – George Ella Lyon; "The Name of God" – Anya Silver M 1.26 — Family, Memory, & Collective Legacy Readings: Description handout, "’N’em" – Jericho Brown; "The House on Moscow Street" – Marilyn Nelson; "A Thousand Mary Doyles" – Sonja Livingston W 1.28 — Historical, Social, & Cultural Naming Readings: "Narrative: Ali" – Elizabeth Alexander; "Miscegenation" – Natasha Trethewey; "At the Cemetery, Walnut Grove Plantation, South Carolina, 1989" – Lucille Clifton; "Another Mary Doyle" – Jacqueline Doyle

​I looked up my essay (naturally) and I see that the family portrait is no longer included at the head of the essay., which is too bad. Interesting to see that I use the combination of speculation, fiction, and nonfiction that I also use in THE LUNATICS' BALL.

Did I report that THE LUNATICS' BALL is the first runner-up for The Gournay Prize at Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press? Really exciting news that I can share. Here's the winners' list.

Just got more good news yesterday that I can't share, and more good news last month that I still can't share yet.  

Here's what I posted on Facebook instead of my usual year-end link to a longer summary on my author website:

"Very grateful to Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University Press, where my manuscript THE LUNATICS’ BALL was named first runner up for the Gournay Prize. Grateful also to the following magazines for publishing my work this year: Hunger Mountain, NUNUM, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, FlashFlood Journal, Fictive Dream, Does It Have Pockets?, and SoFloPoJo. Grateful to Assay for reposting my essay there, to Claudine for a review of my chapbook THE MISSING GIRL, and to Flash Boulevard for publishing the micro included in the 2025 Wigleaf Top 50 longlist. Very grateful to W.W. Norton for including “The Lunatics’ Ball” in the textbook THE LAB: EXPERIMENTS IN WRITING ACROSS GENRE, and to Cornerstone Press for including my essay in the anthology THE PAST TEN. Participating in their reading was the highlight of my AWP, along with seeing so many writer friends, some for the first time in person. Thanks also to writers and editors who included me in readings in San Francisco and online. Thanks to all of you for your support and your own publications. You are a light in this year’s darkness. May you all prosper in your lives and creative endeavors in 2026."

If I'd had more space, I would have mentioned the interviews I did with Naomi Cohn and Grant Faulkner for CRAFT and also how gratifying it has been to work with authors and my great colleagues at CRAFT. How inspiring and supportive my writing group The Leporine Conspiracy has been.  My forthcoming work in LUNCH TICKET, CLEAVER, AND NERVE TO WRITE. 2025 was a very good year! Amazing really.